


riptide

by MoonyJ4M



Series: deep end 'verse [3]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, Hurt, POV Dean Winchester, Pre-Series, Stanford Era, Trans Character, Trans Sam Winchester
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-16
Updated: 2018-02-16
Packaged: 2019-03-19 07:59:07
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,377
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13700247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MoonyJ4M/pseuds/MoonyJ4M
Summary: Dean knows a fair amount of the words Sam doesn’t say; he’s pretty sure Sam knows all of his.





	riptide

**Author's Note:**

> This story follows the events right after Sam leaves for Stanford through Dean's point of view, which is one of the reasons why there is a considerable amount of misgendering here. This whole series is a story about understanding and all that process that comes with it.
> 
> Thank you all who left kudos and/or comments on the fics before this one; I took a long time to finish this for a lot of reasons, but everyone who read them meant a lot for me to continue writing this series. This is a story I want to tell.
> 
> And thank you Dri, once again, for being my first reader ♥

Sam left on a Friday.

That was the only thing Dean could think of for weeks, as if his brain had tripped over a loose end on the carpet and got stuck there. The most meaningless details would play on repeat in his mind as Dad walked around the motel room; he wouldn’t mutter about Sam, wouldn’t make any drunk speeches about his ingratitude, but the loud thump of the things he would throw (more) angrily (than usual) in the bags and in the trunk of the car were eloquent enough, as were the pissed off looks he would give Dean, as if _he_ was the one to blame, the one who couldn’t hold his brother. Sam left on a Friday. Dean didn’t know what he’d left behind on purpose and what he’d forgotten; there were some clothes, old school notebooks, the few books Dean had asked him to check out from the school library, a gun, and his heart, because apparently, Dean had waited till adulthood to become a melodramatic motherfucker.

Well, _fine_.

He could do this, Dean had told himself as he packed up the mementos along with his own stuff. For weeks he’d managed to almost pretend it wasn’t a real situation. He couldn’t repeat the details of the trip if someone asked him, but John had left in a blur just a couple days after Sam and Dean had been left for himself then. He couldn’t not laugh at the irony. He hadn’t gone away with Sam because he couldn’t leave their father, their life, and then the guy simply leaves Dean behind on the first opportunity.

Sometimes he can’t avoid wondering if it’s a test, if John wants to know what he will do if given the freedom to choose. Dean laughs at the innocence of the thought and then is surprised at his own bitterness. That’s Sam’s way of putting things, isn’t it?

It takes him a couple weeks drinking himself to sleep in the two-bed rooms he insists on getting checked into to his initial numbness to start taking a turn into anger. Sam didn’t have the right to leave him, he thinks. Not now, not like this.

It’s not like he hadn’t seen it coming. It’s not like Dean hadn’t noticed how distant Sam had become, and even how at the same time he seemed more regretful of his anger, as if he was mourning what he wouldn’t have anymore. He had begged him to not go hunting so many times those last few months. Dean doesn’t want to calculate how much extra time they would have had together if he had complied; things were bad enough already.

When he’s going through the online news searching for something to hunt he can’t really read the letters in front of him; he’s looking for Palo Alto news before he knows it, checking if there isn’t anything suspicious there for the time being. Lucky him if it was only about monsters; he knows what people do to people like Sam. It’s not like he doesn’t know how to take care of himself, Dean tries to reason, he had shown Sam the ropes himself. But Sam isn’t _there_ and it eats at him more than anything else ever did.

**.x.**

Dean doesn’t feel sad very often. He doesn’t like the way the affirmation sounds in his head; it looks like one of those things people say to differentiate themselves from other people, as if it makes them somehow better. There’s not a lot of things Dean could say that make him better than anyone; more experienced in some areas, maybe. More scarred, certainly. But never better.

He knows how sadness feels like; he can feel it in whatever it is that tugs at his heart when he thinks about his mother, in the nostalgia of things he doesn’t even remember anymore and of things he’ll never have, he can feel it in the things he doesn’t dare to think about.

He’s sitting on the roof of the Impala, parked by the side of the road, with even more layers of clothing than he would like to, because it is fucking freezing. It’s probably not even seven in the morning yet; he doesn’t look at his clock, but the sky is still in that cold blue that antecedes the sunrise. Dean is not sad, not really. But he is also not feeling anything else.

In their line of work that is not exactly uncommon, he thinks. You do what you gotta do to protect yourself from getting mad at the incredible amount of shit there is in the world, and if that means closing yourself then, well. It comes with the job. But it bothers him, it really does, when it’s over and everything else comes crashing down on him.

In a moment like this he would usually look for something to do, to ride it out while he at least makes himself useful, but now he’s just staring ahead, not really focusing on the cars passing by on the road by his side. On his other side, some feet ahead, there’s a line of trees. It’s a beautiful sight, if he stops to think about it. He doesn’t, though; he can’t hold on to any thought, it’s like his mind is made of quicksand, swallowing everything that dares to come to its center.

Right at the center it’s the single, pervasive certainty that he’s only a couple hours away from Stanford.

His phone rings and he takes a while to register the sound. Dean follows through the motions of fishing it out of his jacket and answering with a distant hello. Dad wants him back to the motel, something to say about the case. Dean answers him with all affirmatives as he is well used to do and gets back to the car. He turns the engine on, watches the small cloud forming as he exhales in that cold ass morning - the sun has already risen, after all - and then it comes.

One, two, three punches to the wheel. One more for good measure.

“Fuckin’ asshole,” he says to no one in particular.

**.x.**

“We’re leaving in the morning,” John says, and as simple as that he gets up and leaves. Dean figures it’s about midnight now; he’d lost his watch in the fight earlier when they took down a werewolf in the woods. It hadn’t been pretty, and Dean’s sure that when tomorrow comes he’ll be sporting some impressive shades of purple in his body. John’s much probably not in a better shape than he is but they had ended up at a bar on the way back to the motel anyway.

“That mustn’t be the least awkward way to get drunk,” the bartender says, and Dean registers after a second or two that it had been directed at him. He must have signaled he didn’t get it because she continued, “Drinking with your father.”  

“You get used to it,” he flashes her a smile while she fills his glass again.

“Got yourself a broken heart?” she asks. Dean figures he must be the less annoying patron there at the moment so that she sticks with him.

“You could say that, yeah,” he answers, for once in his life legitimately more interested in his glass. Mentioning Sam in any way hurts more than any of the bruises he got today; his absence is still like a wound he has to avoid poking too much. He’s not really that much successful at that, though.

When he looks up again she’s already serving at the other end of the counter. Dean leaves the money there and heads out; he doesn’t really believe they’ll leave at dawn because Dad’s probably drunk out of his ass right now, having left there to lick his wounds somewhere else. He knows the ropes.

Dean’s been like this lately; one moment he drinks himself stupid, the other he gets bored before even starting. It’s like Sam took away his balance with him, among so many other things.

**.x.**

Dean manages to sit at the bar for all of ten minutes before giving up and sitting at the hood of the nearest car parked in the back. He had left the Impala at the motel and walked there, fearing that the roar of the engine alone would scare Sam off and he would lose his chance.

He might as well lose it now for his own cowardice, he muses. He doesn’t really have a reason to think Sam would flee on him, if he wants to be honest with himself - which he usually doesn’t. It’s not like he hadn’t called, or hadn’t manifested the wish to see him again. In fact, Dean was the one who stopped answering after a while. Perhaps it is the illusion of control he’s trying to get at; coming unannounced, making a surprise, having the upper hand.

Dean pats his pockets in search of a cigarette and curses himself when he doesn’t find one; he must have left them in the other jacket. It’s probably for the best; he doesn’t want to get too hooked up on the thing, it’s good enough that he still has some illusion of control.

Well, ain’t _that_ funny again.

The college dorms aren’t so far that he can’t get there walking, Dean _guesses_ , because he might or might not have taken a look at them. He is honestly not so sure; he half hopes the night when he got so banged that he parked in front of the building and started calling Sam on repeat, just to have it fall on the voicemail over and over again, had just been just a nightmare. He’s usually not that lucky, though.

He’s reasoning whether Sam would or would not want to see him again after that when people start getting there. Dean’s honored with a few wary looks as a small flux of people gets in and out of a bar nearby. Maybe Sam was warned about the strange looking guy creeping in the back of the cafeteria, maybe it is what always makes them turn in the right direction; one way or another, Sam spots him almost before Dean spots Sam, and certainly before he can pretend to be ready for it.

Rationally Dean knows it’s not like they haven’t seen each other in a really long time. You don’t stop knowing someone just because you have not seen them for eight months or so; for Dean’s entire life, though, that has been the longest time he’s ever spent without seeing Sam.

“Hey,” he says, a big goddamn dimpled smile making an appearance, as if Dean’s an honest to God good surprise. He doesn’t have time to try and find an excuse for being there before being engulfed in Sam’s arms; freaking long legs didn’t take a second to walk up to where he is.

Dean wants to say a couple things, but not now, not really. He’s glad enough to take the moment to breathe for what feels like the first time in months, fill up his lungs with the smell of coffee mixed with Sam’s own, a sweeter cologne than the one he used to wear and the unmistakable smell of his skin, imprinted on Dean’s sense memory as much as the instinct to protect him of all things evil. He closes his eyes and basks on it for the eternity of a few seconds until Sam gently lets go of him. Dean has to actually look up to find his eyes; he’s grown even taller, now probably more than Dad.  

“It’s really not sketchy at all to wait here,” he says. “Why didn’t you come in?”

“I was going to, I was just... thinking,” he said. It’s not _entirely_ untrue, it’s just not in the right order.

“Where’s the car?”

“I left it at the motel,” he pretends not to see Sam squinting at him. “Listen, I.”

Dean closes his eyes for a second, drags his hand across his face; it’s scratchy now, he probably forgot to shave at some point in the last couple days. He’s babbling, he knows he is, and he hadn’t even drunk (too much) today. It’s Sam that gets him drunk, right there so close to him, the only thing he needed more than anything this whole time at his reach again.

Sam leads him out of there with a hand on the small of his back, gentler than anyone who might have ever loved him. They walk the few blocks to the dorms mostly in silence, except for a few people who say hi to Sam in the way and to whom he answers back. He has acquaintances, Dean notes. Of course he has, and the thought itself is so foreign to him that of all the things that he could hold on to this is the one he finds more out of place.

Sam doesn’t take them to the dorm; instead, they sit in a bench near the wall of the building, slightly isolated from the few other people walking around; it’s a Friday night, people are busy going places.

“My roommate, Brady, he’s probably not alone in the room now,” Sam explains. “I can take you there to know it, though, and Brady too if. If you want to,” _if you’re still here tomorrow_. Dean knows a fair amount of the words Sam doesn’t say; he’s pretty sure Sam knows all of his.

He’s different, even though Dean can’t exactly put a finger on what it is. It’s not like he’s dressing differently or anything; his hair is only a little longer, he’s on the exact same kind of clothes they’ve always owned, a flannel shirt and some jeans, and _yet_. He knows Sam is literally not like the other guys the way he knows everything that is important to Sam must be important to him, but there had always been a dissonance between knowing it and _seeing_ it.  

“This Brady guy… Does he _know_?”

“Not _officially_. He figures I’m gay or something, I guess. He barely even stops at the dorm, to be honest.”

 _How are things holding up. Have you been eating. Are you hurt. Do we have to talk about... that_. Dean’s pretty sure both of them are making the same questions in their heads but they just sit there in silence.

“You look good,” he concedes after a while.

“I like it here. It’s calm, y’know? I mean, people are freaking out all the time about exams, and girls, and everything,” Sam inhales, trying to make sense of what to say next. “But it’s different.”

“Less blood and drama, huh? ‘m not sure I could get used to it.”

“It’s not like I’m _not_ freaking out too, it’s just… A good change. You should try it out sometime,” Sam stares at his feet after that, hands in his pockets while Dean’s brain also struggles to think of anything.

It is not as hot there as it is in some places Dean has been before, but it’s enough to announce that time of the year when they’re going to have to lose some layers of clothing to avoid dehydrating; Dean feels his hands get cold and dry while they talk anyway. He puts them in his pockets, nonchalantly, fidgets for a while with the keys of the car, with his lighter, with his will. There was a whole series of reasons for Dean to be nervous of being at Stanford, all of them perfectly reasonable, thank you very much, but they had not attacked him all at the same time yet, at least not until now.

“How’s Dad?” Sam asks in a small voice, faster than Dean, before he could collect thoughts enough to form a coherent sentence.

“Y’know. Hunting. Complaining. Same ol’ shit,” he answers, dismissive.

Sam and John didn’t exactly part in the best terms. Dean can still feel the thin walls of the cabin where they were staying tremble as they argued that night. In moments like that Sam couldn’t possibly contain himself even if he wanted to; he didn’t make himself smaller, he was defiant, up in John’s space, each voice louder than the other as they tried to prove a point no one knew what had been in the beginning anymore. In moments like that Dean wished he could be a child again, to have stripped away of him the responsibility of being in the middle of this mess, of being the one who had to take them apart before they start actually hurting each other. Sam had never been afraid of Dad; not like _he_ was, at least. Sam was afraid of the things that indirectly would affect them if they poked the bear the wrong way, but never of Dad himself. Kid was insane.

“Sam, did you…” he starts, plays with his ring without looking up from his boots for a minute before continuing. “Did this,” he makes a gesture to encompass the city around them, the campus, “did it have something to do with… you know.”

Sam laughs that way he does when things aren’t funny at all. He crosses his leg, comes closer to Dean as if to tell him a secret.

“I didn’t leave because of you, Dean,” he says, looking at him in the eye. “I don’t want you to think that.”

“I thought we…” Dean says, grimaces would better describe it. They had kissed countless times after that particular hunt last summer; every time they would find themselves alone they would make out like teenagers in a library, furtive and desperate, almost innocently, for it would never go further than that. They didn’t talk about it, not ever.

“We could…” Sam completes his half-sentence with yet another half, with the insecure smile of who knows that it is a dead end. “Haven’t you ever wanted to leave?”

“Can you honestly imagine me here, in a place like this? Or wherever else that looks like this?” he scoffs, but he’s wanted, yes. It’s buried down deep there, in the part of his mind he doesn’t dare to mess with, a Dean Winchester who once wanted different things, a different life, a different him. He’s just learned to let it die in him earlier than Sam.

“I can imagine you with me,” Sam says, and he sighs when Dean gets up as if he knew it could spook him. “Don’t leave me hanging here, okay, don’t do that…”

“I’m not, I’m just... “ Dean scrapes the back of his neck, the weight of the world sitting there already. There are so many things at the same time, he doesn’t know where to begin to freak out. He simply doesn’t know. “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay? Promise. I’ll come by tomorrow.”

He leaves on foot, without looking behind, stops by at the first convenience store for a pack of Marlboros. The smoke burns his throat as he inhales and he takes that as pleasure. There is just too much at the same time.

 **.x.**    

“Jesus Christ, how do you stand these people,” Dean states more than asks. They’re in the last stools of the bar, after Sam’s work hours, with a panoramic view of the people who were coming and going to embarrass themselves. Sam snorts at Dean’s expression, some of the beer drips a little down his chin; Dean doesn’t have much time before Sam cleans it up with his wrist to try and catch back his thought of licking it off him. A blink and it’s there, out in the air just for him to know.

He’d kept his promise and met Sam a couple hours ago, and was gifted with a smile of relief. Sam did thought he would bail on him. He’s considered it, to be honest, but rejected the idea at the prospect of spending another god knows how many months moping around the country. Not that anyone needed to know about it. Not that even Sam needed to know.

“They’re rich, drunk and think they know more about everything than anyone else. You should see Law students bragging to each other.”

“That’s what you want, Law?”

“I think it is, yeah,” he says, swirling the bottle without looking at Dean, as if it wasn’t information worthy enough of being said out loud.

“You’re good enough for that,” Dean says, even if he’s not sure if that is something Sam wouldn’t know by himself at this point. It hurts him a little, though, it always does; Sam’s always wanted so much more than Dean’s been capable of keeping up with. “But me? I couldn’t rest my head and sleep at night for this. There’s evil out there, Sammy.”

“There is. People can be evil too.”

“Don’t give me the lawyer shit talk now, okay, you’re a fucking freshman. Put yourself in your place.” They laugh it off, drink in silence. The bar gets busier as the night goes by, even thoughts get more difficult to hear. Sam’s had fake IDs since he was fifteen  - just in case, you know - but only now he does look a little more like he could be twenty-one. If you squint, under the right light angle. “You wanna stay at the motel tonight?” Dean asks before he can control his tongue, slurring a little as the alcohol gets in his system, makes him mellow and somewhat bold.

“Yeah, sure.”

They walk side by side, still drinking, passing by strangers who are also on their way to seize the weekend as they can. Dean usually does it by killing something, banging someone or watching some old movie on the TV; if all of it happens in the same night or the order in which it happens depends on his luck. Sam spots the Impala parked before anything else and goes up to the car, touches her hood with a fond smile.

“Haven’t seen it in a while.”

“We can take a ride tomorrow,” Dean says. Sam opens and closes his mouth as if to speak, still smiling. He chooses silence; Dean wonders if he’s still thinking whether or not he will run away in the middle of the night. He can’t assure him of anything, though, so he chooses silence as well.

Last night he had stopped at some other bar in the way there, picked up a girl, brown hair, brown eyes, smart tongue. They had kissed and fumbled with each other's clothes against that wall and they had fucked in that bed, and Dean had been so, so mad all the time because he was broken, completely broken. Sam broke him.

“You’ve got into the luxury of getting yourself a queen size now?” Sam says, aiming at a playful tone, but standing still in the middle of the room and fumbling at the bracelets in his wrists. Had Dean not known him, were they not brothers, and that could be another one of his hookups, a person standing self-consciously in the middle of his room, waiting for the first step. It feels unnatural; he and Sam are part of the same engine, not some deregulated machine whose gears were out of sync. At least they were not supposed to be.

“Shut up, princess,” Dean finally breaks the spell, tossing his empty bottle in the trash and taking out his boots, one by one. He gets rid of the jacket and flannel, plops down on the bed with an arm draped over his eyes, exhausted. Of overthinking, probably. “Turn the damn AC on, would ya.”

Sam does it and slowly follows Dean steps. He opens his eyes to stare at Sam, to watch him take his wallet out of his pocket and put it on the small table on the corner of the room, along with his watch and cellphone. Sam is still leaner than him, but he never stops getting taller. Every time Dean thinks his growth spurt ended, there he was a inch taller than before. Sam lays down beside him like they did when they were kids, face turned to Dean, foreheads almost touching. 

“Help me understand this,” Dean pleads, a hand in Sam’s hair, the other arm tucked under his head as way of a pillow. “You’re were hurting, you’re were always hurting and I didn’t know what to do. Just help me understand if this is okay now.”

Sam had told him that he was a girl a long time ago; at that time Dean hadn’t understood exactly what to do with that information or what exactly that meant at all. He treated it the way most things are treated when he couldn’t figure them out; he let the matter solve itself by not talking directly about it anymore. He figured it was enough, that Sam just needed to get it out of his chest, to let someone know. To feel like he could be whoever he wanted to be when it was just him and Dean. And he could be. Dean believed that, he had to.

Sam smiles, no humor in it. “It’s not your fault, it’s not something you have to fix. I made a choice to come here, to blend. I’m not hurting, not like I was before. It’s just… One thing at a time and maybe one day I’ll get there.”

“Get where?”

“Where I can be myself. Feel like this is my own skin.”

“You see, this is where I don’t get it. You’ve always been Sam. So you’re like ‘ _Dean, I’m a girl_ ’ and I’m just ‘ _okay, cool_ ’ because what’s the difference to me? You just my Sam. I don’t see it.”

“Would I just be your Sam if I, dunno, wore a dress, had boobs and stuff?”

Dean closes his eyes for a while, gets whiplash from the images in his head. He’d been lying if he said he’d never thought about that before. “Honestly, I don’t know if I wouldn’t be a jerk about it but yeah, you would be Sam. My little brother.”

Sam smiles at him, buries his- _her_ face in the pillow for a while. Sam’s not dead in there, it’s what Dean needs to understand. She’s just in the wrong wiring.

“Can’t I be your little sister?” Sam smiles at him, sheepishly. “Just… just this one thing. I don’t ask you to _understand_ \- hell if I understand myself all the time - but just to try.”

“Just smack me in the head if I get it wrong, okay?” Dean says, and he smiles back at Sam but is scared as shit at the same time, not sure of what that'll mean in the long run.

He thinks of that girl again, how her waist was small, how she was short, smaller than him, how she didn't _fit_. Sam had broken him for other people with a just bunch of kissing in a hot summer. He brings Sam closer to him, holds her jaw to thumb at her lip and can't avoid feeling the prickling hair that's growing there. It makes his heart hurt a little when he thinks that one day she may change, look like another person, another body; he already sees the little changes that come with living with a little more freedom, the way of carrying herself she couldn’t have before, the gentleness of the touch, of the voice, of her eyes.

He wants to believe he first kissed Sam that last summer because he had known she was slipping away from him for a while and had wanted to keep her there just for a little longer. Just a little closer. They were so fucked up in some many ways already, what could a touch of lips do on the top of the pile? But he can’t think of anything anymore when she lets his thumb slip into her mouth, almost invites it there. There are, of course, so many things Dean can pretend to himself, so many things he can deny, but he can’t say he’s never thought about it before.

Sam lets go of his hand just long enough to pull him over her and Dean feels like he’s short-circuiting right there. It’s not the booze as much as it is the crazy, all-encompassing feeling of being with Sam, of needing always _more_ , so much more that he thinks he can die of it, that he is a burning man drowning at the sea if he doesn’t close all the spaces between them. Dean doesn’t know what he feels for her as love; he knows it as living, and sometimes it is as painful as the first one. She’s apparently not so far from his own particular hell for she clings to him in a way she didn’t dare to when they were messing around last year.

Dean stops for a second to pull his shirt off, to open flies, to pop buttons out of their cases. Sam barely lets him stop for another one to look at her, to let him record her features in case they change too much. Sam’s hands can almost close around his arms, she feels him up, lets them take a ride along his torso, scratch here and there with the nails she couldn’t always keep before. Sam’s all pliant, hard muscle, hard edges, hard cock; Dean falters a little at that, never really had gone that far with guys or whoever else could have the equipment. It couldn’t be so different of his own, and it’s not like he didn’t know Sam from all possible angles since forever, but he honestly didn’t know if he was supposed to like it too or not, and right now there wasn’t a lot of blood going to his upstairs brain for him to figure out.

Sam hooks him out of the brain freeze by turning over under him. She is suddenly just there, all miles of her back leading down to her ass, pushing Dean down to glue his body on top of hers, because Dean is not the only person in this equation dying for the contact. He comes later between her asscheeks, slick with spit and precum, whispering filthy into her ear. Sam hadn’t stopped rutting against him right away and still slipped a hand between her and the bed before finally letting herself flop down against it, panting heavily as if they had just fucked their brains out and not rubbed one out like horny teenagers. Horny teenagers who just bought themselves tickets straight to Hell, but still.     

**.x.**

Dean can count on the fingers of one hand the number of times he actually goes up to Stanford after this one time. He would need even fewer fingers to count how many times he did actually let Sam know he’d been there. They talked on the phone though, every now and then; Sam would talk about the lame ass life as a pre-Law and she would be always, always, be writing something. Dean would complain about greasy monsters and not mention how he’d walked up to the bar Sam used to go a couple weeks ago, about how he had asked for her and the other girl tending the bar had said that Sam had been busy moving out of the dorms. He didn’t know if the girl had told Sam about it, but Sam didn’t mention it either. In fact, she’d never told him she was going to move. If someone had asked, he wouldn’t be able to explain exactly why he had been distancing himself from her. Dean just let himself get distracted by pretty much everything else under the sun; the job, the girls, the fucking shapes of the clouds in the sky if needed, but he pushed and pushed until the urge to see Sam, to know about her, to feel what he needed to feel would slip out of his mind.

He wouldn’t tell her how John had caught him pressing a guy against a wall of the motel just the other week. He’d been a little drunk, true, but not so much as to not know that doing it right under John’s nose had been just dumb. Maybe he wanted him to know… something. Something that he wouldn’t like, something that would at least disrupt the barrier of silence and _yessir_ that existed now and ever. One way or another, John just stopped there at the corner of one of the corridors, made a double-take and looked back to where Dean was, hand inside the other guy’s pants, touching, feeling, testing whatever the hell it was that he was looking for in his own tastes. Dean saw him too. It lasted for a second, or just enough for John to look up and down, sigh, shake his head as if yes, it was exactly what he expected, as if it confirmed something for him, and then he left.

He wouldn’t tell Sam that for once the roles were inverted, that he was the one drunk and for once in his life dad hadn’t seemed to be so. He wouldn’t tell her that for once his mind was blank of excuses, that he stared at their father as if he had been just waiting for him to leave. It was not something to be proud of, though. He was not trying to make a point of anything. It was just another step on his ever-growing ladder in the direction of the Do Not Care land. He couldn’t expect this ladder to have a really good foundation, though.

“Sam’s got an apartment in Palo Alto. He’s pre-Law and shit,” he says one day when they’re eating breakfast, apropos of nothing. John never asked about Sam, but Dean doesn’t doubt he also has his ways of knowing things. Or at least people who care enough about Sam to drop pieces of information here and there, like he just did.

“Hm,” he mumbles in acknowledgment around a piece of bacon, not looking up.

“Why don’t you care about it?” Dean says, letting his fork down with a clink in the plate. He genuinely wants to know. “Why don’t you give a shit about…”

“Everything I ever did,” he cuts, not raising his voice or stopping fumbling with the food altogether, “was giving a shit about you boys. You don’t come with this crap at me. You ain’t a kid anymore,” he continues, pointing the fork at Dean. “If you wanna go be a girl like Sam you get your shit and go, it’s not like your mother ever mattered to you guys anyway.”

Dean got shot for the first time when he was fourteen, in a crossfire gone wrong with other hunters that didn’t know they were already working the case at the time. The bullet entered his thigh and stayed there till they found the closest hospital, and he felt the pain spread after the first wave of impact as the wound bled like a motherfucker making his brain feel like jello.

He takes two shots now; first when John says that Sam went out to be a girl. It probably means two completely different things for him and for John, it is his damned way to insult what he thinks to be Sam’s sexuality, but the way he says it makes Dean cringe. The second shot is at the mention of his mother and for what feels like the first time in his life Dean resents her, because she is this pure, immaculate presence in their imaginarium that John gets to play at his will to get them to do what he wants. He resents her because he doesn’t know her, doesn’t know what she would say, what she would think, he only remembers pieces that one day will also get blurred enough to disappear, and the rest is filled with silence, once again.     

Dean leaves the diner with his food threatening to make its way up to the outside world, anger bubbling up as he paces around, kicks the wheels of the Impala, would kick his head too if he could. But it works, it always works, and the strongest feeling he’s had these past few months is concentrated in how he hates himself when he’s driving behind John’s truck an hour later, wiping away angry tears with the back of his hand. He cares. He cares too damn much about everything at the same time and it’s digging a hole in him, to the point he doesn’t even know what he’s got to do anymore, except doing the same old same.

Dean stares at Sam’s number on his phone for a long time that night, and in the following two weeks or so, but they don’t talk. At this point he already knows she’s been dating here and there, he can’t decide whether to believe it was just because things were supposed to be like this anyway or because he stopped going there. What could he expect, anyway? It was not like he ever asked anything of her.

He’s thinking like someone who’s got a broken heart. Maybe that’s the disease after all.

**.x.**

Dean won’t ever know exactly if the events were related but the fact is that it didn’t take much more than two months after their last little drama for John to disappear. He calls it a _disappearance_ in his mind, like this, with all letters and red signs, because it feels like it. It also feels like it’s just an asshole move, but it’s not like he knows the difference anyway. It feels above all - and here Dean may be a little guilty - like an excuse and he’s not getting a lot of these lately.

Sam’s gone as radio silent as him; Dean figures it’s just fair enough. He can muster enough distorted facts to be mad at Sam, or at least to pretend to be to justify himself. He needs an excuse not only to go there, but to not have gone before. How does he explain that? _I wanted to, but was scared of staying. I wanted to, but didn't come anyway. I wanted to, but wanted to believe you didn’t._

Now he just wants to.

 


End file.
